I'm the reason they started prayers in school. I'm also the proof that prayer is not enough.

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completely true accounts from my life

Every spring on the prairies there were a zillion “teas” like we were supposed to be impressed that we were throwing off the heavy blankets of our strong coffee winters and embracing light and airy tea because nothing says spring like “tea.”

I mean it is not like we didn’t have cute little farm animals being born and pretty flowers blooming in the fields and even young men and young women getting frisky but oh my gosh … spring … tea … you get the connection right??

Me neither.

But we had many, many, many, spring teas. There were many. One such tea was the annual “Strawberry Tea.” They obviously were building on the “let’s throw words and concepts together that have zero connection or meaning to what we are doing” concept as I don’t ever remember there being any strawberries anywhere . . . not in the tea and not in the cakes. Strawberries don’t even grow in the spring! But we pretended.

We were women and we were all going to pretend that we all knew what we were doing and why it was happening. Women do that well. Look how we breeze through puberty and do the whole getting married, having babies and stuff. None of us has a clue what any of that is about but we fake it and we look good while we fake it. We had been snowed in for weeks. We had all lived for most of those weeks with layers and piles of clothing – much of it flannel and serviceable and some of it really tacky with mismatched patterns. Perhaps that was more to the point of why a spring tea … because it meant we could take off the flannel underwear, put on a pretty frock and let our pasty white legs feel a little sunshine. Continue reading “Strawberry Fields Forever.”→

My brother read in an encyclopedia that our eyebrows are important because they, along with our eyelashes, help to keep dirt out of our eyes. He theorized that if dirt got into our eyes, we could get an infection that could get into our brain and we could die.

Please don’t ask me to explain the mind of a 9-year-old boy.

I was the victim of the crime. He lured me into the forest to, “see the nest of baby birds” he had found, tied me up to a tree and shaved off my eyebrows. He probably would have plucked out my eyelashes but I had good teeth and managed to gnaw one of the ropes off and gave him a black eye.

BTW, I am the one that got in trouble because “a punch could have caused real damage” and my eyebrows would grow back.

Why was it common practice for people to buy entire sets of encyclopaedias for their kids and never even check them out to make sure what kind of information they contained? They could have contained porn, or the complete guide to being a serial killer and they would never have known. They just unpacked the books and proudly put them in alphabetical order in the bookcase and said,”Here kids, go get educated.” How irresponsible is that? My brother used the information contained in our set of encyclopaedias to try and kill me. I just want to know where the parental security measures were then? Passwords? Lockdowns? I wonder how many children died because we spent hours reading those things without any parental supervision? Paedophiles could have left their names and numbers to become our pen pals and how would anyone have known? Continue reading “Without Eyebrows We Could Die.”→

Negotiating pee breaks is like negotiating world peace. Utmost diplomacy must be used and proper wording is crucial. There must be ceremony and goodwill fostered – gifts exchanged – before the two parties sit down at the negotiating table. Big things are at stake here.

“Are you planning on stopping for gas soon?”
“No.”
“Um OK. “Hungry?”
“No.”
“How far to the next town?”
“8000 km.”
“I could use a washroom, you know, when it is convenient to stop.” I smile hopefully.
DEAD SILENCE.
I try again, “You know, like if you happen to see a rest stop along the way and it is easy to pull off … I am not desperate yet or anything, I am just trying to give you good notice that I will need to stop in the next hour ok?”
“Ya sure, we can see …”

Queensland has a butterfly swarm going on right now. Millions of butterflies are in the skies as those from further west are heading our way in search of food.

Every time I step outside it literally feels like I am stuck in one of those over the top, entitlement obsessed weddings where the bride and groom are not allowed to move without there being an entourage of people to move the dress, a harp and stringed instruments to background the whole thing, and butterflies or doves being released.

One could argue that a swarm of millions of butterflies is much nicer than a swarm of bees. I would argue that at least with a swarm of bees death is a real possibility. This has been going on for days. I constantly have people telling me there is something in my teeth and I have to remove a butterfly wing or even a leg or arm … Continue reading “10 Billion Free Butterflies.”→

I had this great, great aunt who I am sure was alive when prohibition was on and if she wasn’t .. she definitely felt cheated. It was her mission in life to tell other people what to do … including God. Like the day she died she called everyone and told them she had decided to die that afternoon and could they please come by in the morning so she could give them her last instructions … not about what to do with her .. about what we needed to do with ourselves. By 2:00 she was real pissed with God that He was running a little late and by 5:00 (fashionably late) she was finally on her way. She was a part of the non-silent, aged, religious majority in my life. … a NARM!!

If you were talking on the phone, it was not uncommon for her to pick up her line and cut in and start telling you about how to treat that cold (always involved some combination of obscure and common plants, food items and cleaning products that should be ingested and/or rubbed vigorously on your body) or why you shouldn’t talk like that and btw remember to tell Humpydora that the quilting bee was at her place next week. Hey,party lines were cheaper, phones were for practical use and no-one had time to just sit on the phone and chat for hours anyway so who cared? I cared deeply about my time on the phone, but as she pointed out, I didn’t count. Continue reading “Growing Up, When I Was Not Down With Religious Up-Bringing.”→

Today was a big day for me. (You might want to gather the office folk around your desk so that you can experience what is like for me. They can help to build excitement. I have no idea HOW to build that but you probably have some kind of engineer there. If you don’t, no worries, pick any man and he can pretend he knows how to do it and then you can all join in. I am pretty sure that whatever it involves, at the end there is a big song and dance finale involving wheat and square dancing skirts. Oh. Oh. And see if someone can get some dry ice and put it in a bucket of water. Awesome effect.)

Today hubby announced we were going to the BIGGG Bunnings Store. Think Home Hardware only add dinner plate size bug zappers and alligator proof waders. Hubby said we had to be up bright and early because he, “Bob the bumbler, builder, attempter, Means Well,” wanted to put up a garden shed. Of course he needed to do it all by himself, having already poured the concrete pad, prepped everything, etc. He had it all figured out. Nod your heads here vigorously and look hopeful. Ohhh,and have angels singing or play an Eric Whitacre piece. Same thing. Continue reading “Bunning’s Men.”→

My childhood was pretty brutal. We learned hard lessons in unspeakable ways. You might want to get out the hanky now, this is yet another sad sad tale.

Wandering around the prairies as kids, trying to find something to do, I mean after we had exhausted looking at the cows and weaving wheat, making pictures with wheat, chewing the wheat, smoking the wheat, rearranging the cows . . . it was tough to find things to do.

So we wandered. We reeeeaaaallly wandered. . . as far as our little legs would take us in a given day.

And we would find awesome, abandoned buildings. Some were just granaries out in the middles of the field with some old grain, a dead mouse and/or bird somewhere inside that we pretended were dead cowboys and we immediately morphed in The Lawman, or the Lone Ranger and Tonto. We whipped out our imaginations from our back pockets and went wild. Sometimes we pronounce the old building a fort, sometimes a castle. The acoustics in those old granaries was awesome so they were, of course, some kind of stage and I made my brother tie his coat around his hips into a type of saloon girl special and we would can can the day away.

I got fired the one and only time in my life because I did not wear a bra. I was hired to work in a nursing home and after three nanoseconds, I was called into the office.

I was going to hell AND I was fired.

I could have fought it. I had a blouse on with a pullover baggy sweater on top. Even with my bra, given the freezing temperature that they kept the nursing home in, presumably to keep the corpses for a few days until the morgue could make their rounds, my nipples would have been detectable. Well, I mean IF someone had stared at them for a long long time, crossed their eyes a little and mistook some pilling for a bump. Seriously, my nipples and my breasts were pretty much non-events at the time. Continue reading “Boobie Confusion.”→

Hubby likes to make sure that he gets really natural foods. We used to get our honey from the markets and a little stall complete with a woman wearing a bee costume, with black and yellow signage and a declaration signed by some 1000 bees, authenticating that they have picked her picture out of a 12 face line-up as the woman who had indeed, stolen their honey. She had bandages all over her body with penned wording and arrows stating “bee stings.” Of course, there could have been nothing under the bandaids but the visual was pretty impactful. This was a woman who almost died trying to bring us authentic , natural honey. She also had pollen hanging from the end of her nose. Again, no-one scientifically PROVED it was pollen … but we all hoped. When a whole community closes its eyes tight and pretends not to see something or agrees it is something else, it pretty much is. It is called mass imagining and I am pretty sure that it is the explanation behind why anyone thought it was a good idea to vote Tony Abbott in as Prime Minister. I have to believe that or else I have to go kill myself.